The Crypto Illuminati
The Illuminati Round Table
DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi, L0/L2
0:00
-1:29:08

DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi, L0/L2

A look into the world of Crypto from the Chinese Community

Illuminati Round Table Call Notes:

Rick and King Wabi:

  • Twitter: @rickawsb

  • Rick is a crypto holder and DeFi farmer who has been relatively new to the crypto scene since he bought his first Bitcoin in 2017

Crypto investments:

  • Rick is a part of the Crypto Asia Chinese community; that's how he got on board Dogecoin early last year and on Gala, Sandbox, and DeFi Kingdom

  • He bought a decent bag of Luna last May when Luna was close to single digits after he sold half of his Luna bag when the price was around $50 - $60

  • Now, he's trying to make the most of this bear market, to do the market analysis, trying to figure out the best portfolio so he could get ready for the next bull run

"Is there a distinct Chinese market for Chinese-language information flow projects that perhaps non-Chinese speakers aren't aware of because they're just not entrenched in that system that you kind of see?" 

  • WeChat (a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app) is banned in China, and it seems like a lousy source of crypto-related stuff

  • Weibo (a Chinese version of Twitter), given that platform censors crypto

  • Telegram and Discord are, for now, the only crypto-related apps to use in China

Crypto trends in China that should be discussed in the English community?

  • Like in Korea, there are Wemix and Klayton; many crypto projects in China still need to be popular beyond the country

  • Chinese community focuses on top projects like Layer 2, Layer 0, and the latest development on DeFi, but at the same time, there are some Chinese-made projects like the Twitter skin

  • Chinese people develop those projects, but they only aim at the Chinese community

  • When it comes to mainstream projects, the Chinese community faces the same latency sometimes; it's six weeks, sometimes six months, depending on the hype

Different story with GameFi

  • The Asian community is ahead of GameFi because many leading GameFi investors or industry leaders stay in Southeast Asia

  • Rick claims they have first-hand information about GameFi, while the DeFi-related news is going pretty slowly

Introducing King Wabi - who joined the crypto space 5 years ago.

Crypto Investments:

  • Cosmos, Terra, and Phantom were the first ones he got involved with, as well as anything built at that moment on the Cosmos SDK - Rune, Harmony, etc.

  • He got introduced to the early stages of GameFi thanks to Sandbox and Decentraland

  • Wabi gained interest in Phantom, which not so long ago announced joining Metaverse/GameFi 

Rick on GameFi "I'm kind of feeling that the industry might lead next bull run"

  • Still, there are so many different GameFi projects, so it seems difficult to predict who can be the leader in the next bull run

  • All of this makes it difficult for Rick to make an investment decision related to GameFi 

GameFi is an obvious adoption choice

  • Garlam noted that whether you're building DeFi, whether you're building a layer 2, whether you're building a bridge, regardless of whatever you're building, it's going to be "a token-driving adoption and in a token-driven adoption world which is possible in a bull market GameFi made a lot of sense because it was most intuitive"

  • The long development cycle and the monopolization are some of the reasons why GameFi could be a risky investment 

  • GameFi needs AAA games

Back in 2015–2016, the original Cardano idea was to be a GameFi platform

  • An ecosystem that's capturing some social capital is Al Grand and Cardano

  • Cardano wanted to be an Ethereum competitor, and they've captured the Asian market with their NFT

Crypto Fundamentals, according to Garlam:

  • "Fundamental in crypto is still, I think, very fluid because, you know, I don't think this industry is built upon a strong balance sheet and strong cash flow. It's built upon strong liquidity and strong narrative"

  • "It should have more fundamentals going forward, but where we stand right now doesn't have fundamentals. Because, from my point of view, it is very much liquidity and narrative-driven

  • One thing that we should look at when it comes to fundamentals, we can look at protocols and see how much revenue they produce

What's the difference between this bear market and the last bear market?

  • The last bear market was caused because most of the ETH use cases were used to fund ICOs, which inevitably dumped all their ETH treasury into BTC and then dumped that BTC 

  • During the last bear market, there was this website where you could track the activity from most of these blockchains  

  • Wax and Tron had more activity than ETH. Even EOS and NEO, at some point, had more activity than ETH. It was an anomaly

First, look at the project 

  • I always ask questions or at least ask myself what problem this project solves. Can the project be unique in providing a solution to that problem? And can such projects think of a fly-view effect? 

  • Rick finds it difficult to find a great GameFi project at the moment because, as he stated, he found it very difficult to find any unique project that can start to sort of flywheel effect 

"Rick, is there any place where you do your research and have a channel, or should they just follow you on Twitter?"

  • Even though Rick is doing a lot of posts in Chinese, you may follow him on Twitter - @rickawsb

  • As Garlam said, the 'translate" tweet button could be pretty helpful

"King Wabi, where can people find you? You also have a podcast, so share a little bit about that

  • Wabi started his own space called the crypto World Radio - @BecauseBitcoin

  • More info on King Wabi's Twitter account - @KingBoiWabi

  • They will be hosting prominent members from Crypto Twitter people like Trader Mercury and Trader EXO, as well as some people from Cosmos

  • They also have a YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9GAfLVPoNh2_wLIKc_zUOw

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The Crypto Illuminati
The Illuminati Round Table
Weekly Twitter Spaces hosted by Garlam Won and Kadeem Clarke, interviewing influential builders in crypto
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